Familiar Faces Feature Among Animated Films Selected For TIFF’s 2023 Short Cuts Lineup

The Toronto International Film Festival has unveiled its Short Cuts lineup for this year’s event, and of the 42 films selected, 10 are animated.

Women dominated this year’s animated shorts lineup at TIFF. In fact, nine of the ten selected animated shorts were directed or co-directed by women and/or tell women’s stories.

Flóra Anna Buda’s 27 is a clear standout from the lineup after winning the short film Palme d’Or at Cannes and the Cristal for a Short Film at Annecy. We debuted the trailer to Buda’s short about a daydreamy 27-year-old woman who, after a bad bicycle accident, is forced to face __

Another Annecy and Cannes player, Carla Melo Gampert’s La Perra, forgoes dialogue and instead uses watercolors to show the story of a bird girl’s journey to adulthood.

Oscar-nominated filmmaker Daria Kashcheeva (Daughter, 2019) returns to the Short Cuts showcase with her new hybrid film Electra, a standout at this year’s Annecy festival.

This year’s Annecy Audience Award winner, Heta Jäälinoja’s Nun or Never! is a charming and funny story about a group of nuns whose way of life comes under threat by a strange newcomer.

Alisi Telengut’s Baigal Nuur – Lake Baikal screened at, you guessed it, Annecy this year. The stop-motion short reimagines the formation of a sacred lake in Siberia.

Marielle Dalpé’s debut short Aphasia is an unsettling sensory experience that puts its viewers into the world of people with Alzheimer’s disease who are facing the loss of their language capabilities.

One of the most fun shorts from this year’s section is the French stop-motion office mocumentary Human Resources from Trinidad Plass Caussade, Titouan Tillier, and Isaac Wenzek.

Subarna Dash and Vidushi Gupta’s This is TMI features playful stop-motion animation set to extremely candid conversations between a group of Indian women.

One of the section’s more experimental animated shorts, Atefeh Khademolreza’s Meteor addresses the repression faced by women and the LGBTQ+ community in Iran.

Jules Kalla Eyango’s 2d Cameroonian short Mboa Matanda unspools during the key moments of a grief-stricken warrior’s most important battle.

Announcing this year’s lineup, Short Cuts lead programmer Jason Anderson said:

We are thrilled to be able to present such a diverse array of incredible new works by emergent and established film talents from all over the world. We were knocked out by the level of craft and ingenuity in these films, as well as the boldness displayed by so many filmmakers as they explore subjects and themes that couldn’t be timelier or more personal. That’s especially true of the films we’re grateful to present that are by female and female-identifying filmmakers, which comprise nearly 60 percent of this year’s selection.

Animated films featured in TIFF’s 2023 Short Cuts Sidebar

• La Perra – Carla Melo Gampert (Colombia, France)
• Meteor – Atefeh Khademolreza (Canada)
• Nun or Never! – Heta Jäälinoja (Finland)
• Electra – Daria Kashcheeva (Czech Republic, France, Slovakia)
• This is TMI – Subarna Dash, Vidushi Gupta (India)
• Human Resources – Trinidad Plass Caussade, Titouan Tillier, Isaac Wenzek (France)
• Mboa Matanda – Jules Kalla Eyango (Cameroon)
• Baigal Nuur – Lake Baikal – Alisi Telengut (Germany, Canada)
• Aphasia – Marielle Dalpé (Canada)
• 27 – Flóra Anna Buda (France)